Hey everyone, Rees here, and welcome back to another episode of ctrl-alt-rees.
And in this video I’m going to be taking a look at this
WANKE HDMI to USB3 video capture device.
…and no, that’s not a comment on the quality of the thing -
the actual brand name is “WANKE”.
Now as you can see I actually spent £5.99 of my own hard-earned money on this
Which is pretty much my entire YouTube advertising revenue for 2021.
But was it worth the investment?
Now just to set some expectations going into this video, I’ve been capturing video for
my YouTube channel for the past year and a half now and I’ve tried various different
devices:
I started off with an Elgato Game Capture HD
and then I upgraded to this StarTech USB3HDCAP which of course is the kind of bog standard
recommended YouTuber model that everyone uses but
of course quite a high end expensive piece
of kit and discontinued now.
I also recently got this one as it seemed to come quite highly recommended and was a
lot cheaper, and I’m still kind of testing this but so far I’ve actually been really
happy with it, I think it works quite well.
So I thought I would also check out the lower end of the market with the £5.99 WANKE.
Now I’m not gonna be putting these things up against each other side by side because
I don’t think that’s really fair, I want to judge this thing on its own worth for what
it actually is, and for that reason I’m going to be testing it with the RetroTINK-5X.
Now you’re probably already telling yourself:
“Well, why would someone use such a high end expensive upscaler with such a cheap and
nasty video capture device? Surely that’s not a realistic setup that anyone would actually
use.”
…and I actually agree, but I think the purpose of this test is to basically give this thing
the best possible chance that we can - feed it the best signal that we can because ultimately
people are going to be using this for modern consoles and PCs and that kind of thing and
if you are into your retro consoles and your retro gaming, you probably own a scaler like
this anyway.
So why would you want to spend similar money to this on a very high end capture device
if you don’t need to?
The other thing is the RetroTINK-5X actually landed on my doorstep about an hour ago and
I’ve had a very quick play with it
and I just really wanted to use it in a video.
So just opening up the packaging and as you might expect with something of this price
there’s not really a lot to it - we’ve got the device itself which has a blue USB
plug on one end so apparently USB3 - whether it is or not remains to be seen - and on the
other end we have the HDMI connector and that’s all there is to it.
Oh, there’s also an LED on the back which lights up when it’s plugged in and working.
Next thing - we have this fantastic offer from the manufacturers of the device here
- so if you submit a positive review on Amazon they’ll give you a £5 voucher which essentially
pretty much pays for the device, and if you submit a video review they’ll give you a
£10 voucher which is even better!
So essentially they’re paying *you* to take this off their hands which is a bit… Odd?
Quite whether they’ll accept this review I’m not sure, we’ll have to see how it
goes but, yeah, erm, quite common sadly with these cheap Chinese devices on Amazon and
you wouldn’t catch me submitting fake reviews just to get free money but there you go, it’s
*there*.
Next thing - we have these instructions, just pretty basic troubleshooting - what it supports,
what it doesn’t support, if it doesn’t work unplug it and plug it back in, that’s
pretty much all there is to it…
…and of course the driver CD which is inevitably going to go straight in the bin because God
only knows what’s actually on there.
It claims here that it supports Windows XP / 7 / 8 / 10, MacOS and Linux but I found
testing it with all of those operating systems - well - certainly with Windows 10 and the
latest versions of MacOS and Ubuntu, it’s all plug and play, no need for any drivers
whatsoever.
It’s essentially recognised the same as a webcam so if you have any video software
like OBS or - I’m going to be using QuickTime on my Mac here, you just plug it in and it
just works so points there, and no need those potentially dodgy-looking drivers.
So when my RetroTINK-5X arrived this morning the very first console that I reached for
to actually test it with was my Atari Jaguar, and that’s because I have a friend who owns
a Jaguar and a RetroTINK-5X and he’s had no end of problems trying to get it to work.
Now this one is 60Hz modded, it’s a PAL console, and I’ve been testing it with the
TINK this morning and it’s been working perfectly fine. So he’s going to go down
the route of 60Hz modding his console as well and hopefully that will solve that problem.
But that’s a bit off topic for this video.
But as it happens, because I’ve got all of this plugged in and set up already this
is going to be the first console that I’m going to use to test the WANKE.
So, of course, plugging the whole thing in and getting it up and running is dead simple:
You just plug in the HDMI cable…
…then you realise that you’ve unplugged the other end so that goes in there…
…and then this just plugs into a bog standard USB port on your computer.
And that’s it! It’s all ready to go.
So I’m using the Jaguar GameDrive flashcart here just to capture this footage and as you
can see it’s actually looking pretty promising already.
The picture is a little bit soft around the edges but bear in mind that this is a standard
definition device that’s being upscaled and to be fair it’s not all that different
to how it looks on and actual HDTV or through any other capture device - so excellent start
there.
The RetroTINK is just in its completely bog standard settings here so it’s just outputting
a 1080P signal just at 60FPS I think, and they are the same settings that I’m going
to be using for a few other consoles here, I’m going to try passing through some other
resolutions to the capture device a bit later on just to see how it handles them but so
far, as we can see from the Jag footage here, it’s all looking very nice.
Now my only minor complaint so far just in this initial test is the lag.
This thing doesn’t have HDMI passthrough so I’m actually playing on the screen as
I’m capturing here and it’s something that I’ve done before with my other capture
devices and it hasn’t really proven to be a huge problem.
Inevitably you will get lag with these and if you’re using it for streaming it makes
sense to get an HDMI splitter and actually use a separate screen to watch the game as
you stream it.
But it’s something that I thought was worth pointing out and of course it serves as an
excellent excuse for me being completely terrible at all of these games.
So I thought I’d take this opportunity to switch through a few different resolutions
and just see firstly how well this capture device actually handles all of those different
resolutions but also how quickly it can switch between them.
And that’s something that I can do with the RetroTINK quite easily so let’s cycle
through a few of those now and see what happens.
So this one’s just 1080P again, the actual output resolution is the same so no surprises
there.
I’ll just try the next 1080P mode - obviously it handles that perfectly fine.
And this is where things start to get interesting so this is outputting a native 1200P resolution
and as you can see the switch was pretty much instantaneous and the WANKE is handling that
perfectly fine with no issues at all.
Same again for 1440P…
…and 720P.
768P which is a bit of an unusual one but yet again it’s picked that up perfectly
fine, still working perfectly alright.
480P which is of course your standard definition upscaled resolution, that’s the kind of
thing you’d get out of the RetroTINK-2X or maybe something like an original PlayStation
or PlayStation 2.
Again, it works perfectly fine with that.
540P which is a bit of an unusual one, which is one that was included for “pixel aspect
ratio correctness” so to speak.
But again the capture device handles that perfectly fine - no issues whatsoever and
switches to it, doesn’t complain, doesn’t freeze up.
Then I believe, yup, we go back to the 1080P resolution that we were using before.
So, yeah, all looking really promising on that front as well.
The next device I want to test with the WANKE is the Evercade, now of course this is popular
with YouTubers and Twitch streamers alike, and it is a retro gaming handheld which emulates
loads of different games, comes with these really cool cartridges.
I’m going to be testing it with the Namco Museum Collection 1 just because that’s
the first one I grabbed off the shelf, and of course this device has a native upscaled
720P HDMI output which - as we’ve already seen - should work just fine with this capture
device.
Just being on the main menu here on the Evercade just gives me an opportunity to show you what
the lag is like on this capture device, and trust me when I say that you don’t need
any specialist hardware to actually be able to measure this…
So yeah, probably less than a second but probably getting on for about a second’s worth of
lag there.
…and again, not an easy game to play with that lag, but to be fair the picture quality
I think actually looks pretty decent.
So for my third and final test I thought I’d use…
Well, this guy.
So this is a Windows laptop in 1920x1080 resolution running a 1080P YouTube video so I think this
is a really good representation of how this device would work with an actual video source
- say, a camera if you wanted to use it for a webcam with something like a GoPro or another
DSLR or something like that.
Unfortunately I don’t have a camera that outputs a clean HDMI feed and a suitable cable
that I can use to hook this up so this is kind of the best I can do with what I have
available to me.
You can also see the lag there, obviously it’s got a good amount of lag as it switches
through various scenes so I think it’s a good demo of that.
But actually, yet again, picture quality wise I think it’s actually performing really
well for a £5.99 device.
[…in fact, it shared a few elements in common with that console, including lead engineer
Bob Brown, who’d previously been responsible for the home version of Pong…]
[…but if you want to know a bit more about the story behind the Video Music and how it
all works, I highly urge you to check out my original video on the subject, which is
linked down in the description and at the end of this video…]
So there we have it, the £5.99 WANKE video capture device from Amazon.
Now, I actually went into this video wanting to have a bit of a laugh and a joke and a
bit tongue in cheek and kind of poke fun at this thing for its stupid name and the fact
that it costs basically nothing, and I have to say, having tried those other, much higher
end video capture devices that I mentioned at the beginning of the video, I was really,
really pleasantly surprised at how well this thing works.
Obviously because of that lag which I mentioned a couple of times and demoed a couple of times
you wouldn’t want to use this actually streaming games and watching your OBS screen at the
same time, but to be fair you could just buy a very very inexpensive passive HDMI splitter
and just use that perfectly fine and just let this thing get on with it in the background.
And to be fair, you could trust it to just get on with it in the background because - as
I’ve shown - even switching different input resolutions and stuff like that, switching
devices on and off, it’s been absolutely rock solid reliable and not frozen up or anything
like that.
Which is more than I can say for the Elgato device that I first started out with a year
and a half ago.
So when it comes to entertaining your Twitch and/or YouTube audience, would I recommend
having a-
Well, one of these?
Well, yes, actually!
If you enjoyed this review, please do give it a thumbs up, if you’re not subscribed
to the channel already please do consider hitting that subscribe button, as always I’d
love to hear your thoughts down in the comment section.
The link to buy this on Amazon is down in the description, and finally, as always, thank
you very very much for watching, and I’ll hopefully see you again next time.